Bongo's death confirmed

Although there was some confusion earlier in the weekend, Gabon's prime minister has confirmed the death of the country's head of state Omar Bongo. Bongo, the world's longest serving president, died in Barcelona reportedly of cancer.

He'd ruled the oil-rich central African state since 1967. The UK Telegraph noted that Bongo was under investigation by French authorities over allegations that he plundered state resources to pay for huge houses and luxury cars in France.

Illegal fishing in the Gulf of Guinea

The Washington Post has a story on the problem of illegal fishing in the Gulf of Guinea and the assistance being provided by the US Navy to Gabonese officials.

The Post points out that Illegal fishing -- which Somalia's pirates also cite as one reason for their attacks -- strips an estimated $1 billion in yearly revenue from sub-Saharan Africa.

Obscenity quantified

An lawsuit has been filed in France against the heads of state of Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville and Equatorial Guinea. The lawsuit alleges that the three dictators have money and property in France gained via corruption.

What's particularly interesting is some of the numbers cited in the lawsuit. It claims that...

-Gabon's Omar Bongo and his inner circle have 39 residences (most of which situated in Paris' chic 16th arrondissement). The world's longest serving president also has 70 bank accounts. Not bad for someone who's been formally earning a public servant's salary since 1960.

-The family of Congo-Brazzaville's strongman, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, is reported to have 24 apartments and 112 bank accounts in l'Hexagone.

-Equatorial Guinea's madman Teodoro Obiang Nguema is a pauper by comparison, with only an apartment and eight luxury cars discovered.

These numbers are only what they own in France alone and what's been able to be identified by the French authorities.

Portrait of the head of state as a very wealthy man

The Guardian has a piece on the interminible reign of Omar Bongo. Gabon's head of state is now the world's longest serving leader, a particularly remarkable achievement given the difficult neighborhood of central Africa.

Much like Mobutu in neighboring Zaire, Bongo, while certainly a dictator, has generally used petrodollars to buy off the opposition rather than brutalize it a la Mugabe or Meles.

When multipartyism was ushered in during the early 1990s following months of unrest, Bongo again found that money could solve any problem. Opposition politicians who criticised him in public, or showed any signs of popularity, were brought into the government, and soon compromised, notes The Guardian.

The scale of the high-level cronyism and corruption astonishes diplomats from other African countries.

The most choice cabinet positions are reserved for Bongo's immediate family. His son, Ali-Ben Bongo, is the minister of defence, and, it is whispered on the streets, the heir apparent. Bongo's daughter, Pascaline, is the head of the cabinet. Her husband, Paul Toungui, is minister of finance.

But like many dictators, one of Bongo's main appeals is to stability, something that resonates in such a volatile region.

[M]any Gabonese are proud of their country, and of Bongo. His success in keeping peace in a country with 40 different ethnic groups, while neighbouring countries have all experienced serious strife, is regarded as a significant accomplishment.

But there is a serious lack of schools, health clinics and paved roads, astonishing for a country with so much oil money and so little civil conflict. Agricultural production is virtually nil; fruits, vegetables and even milk are imported. With oil running out and food prices on the rise, Bongo's control of the country may finally be seriously tested.

Gabon's opposition leader 'goes soft'

Dumb dictators repress the opposition, making them into martyrs and fueling public anger. Smart dictators bribe the opposition into joining their own camp. Zaire's Mobutu was a master of this. That's why none of the non-armed political opposition had any public credibility to exploit the situation when his hollow regime finally collapsed.

Another smart strongman is Gabon's Omar Bongo. Though Africa's longest serving ruler, Bongo doesn't make the continental headlines very often. This is part of what makes him a smart ruler. Bongo may treat Gabon as his personal fiefdom, but he doesn't flaunt it to outsiders too ostentatiously. Not making too many enemies has been critical to his longevity in power (40 years), especially since he runs a country with that most coveted of commodities: oil.

According to the pan-African magazine Jeune Afrique, Bongo met with then radical opposition leader Pierre Mamboundou last August in the presidential palace.

Mamboundou asked the head of state for an envelope of 11.4 billion CFA francs [US$23.6 million] to finance 21 projects in Ndendé, the small town in southern Gabon of which he was the mayor. President Bongo, often ready to loosen the purse strings to benefit his visitors, acquiesed and 3 billion [CFA francs] were earmarked later on.

Bear in mind that it was Mamboundou himself who revealed the visit, which insisting that he didn't pocket anything personally.

Normally, this might not seem anything out of the ordinary, even for an opposition politician. After all, he was simply the mayor of a town asking for help; no different than an American mayor trying to squeeze pork out of a governor or Congressman. But as Bongo's archenemy, Mamboundou had repeatedly denounced not simply Bongo, but the entire system in place.

The former radical justified his actions. "It's a system with which we don't agree but we must work with whomever's in power if we want to develop our localities."

One opposition member complained, "He always wanted to appear as a pure, hard core opponent but we see know that his tone vis-a-vis Bongo has softened," adding that "everything depends financially on the head of state, it's against this that he [Mamboundou] rallied around him all the opponents one after the other."

The ex-opposition leader has done a great deal of harm to the cause of transparency and good governance. Petrocracies like Gabon tend to be based on the premise that state money really belongs to the Leader who can dispense it entirely at his whim for his own purpose.

Mamboundou has been co-opted by the system he spent years so bitterly denouncing. He sold his soul for 20 bits of silver. But will his town or his country be any better for it? I doubt it.